Step back and take a deep breath. Smell the sausage. The dems think they need to pass a health care bill, any bill, even the Senate bill but only if they can pass new bills to fix some of the crapola in the Senate bill so the end result looks more like the House crapola, except the House far left didn’t like their first version so they might … ah do something and then someone else might do something and then magically two hunks of rotten meat will be merged into the tasty sausage they promised.

It appears they think rotten meat can become palatable if their party has the magic wand after the election. It appears both sides are fighting for control of Tinkerbell’s wand of “When you wish upon a star, Makes no difference who you are. Anything your heart desires will come to you”

Kudos to the songwriter for intended consequences of a children’s song. The children who heard that growing up are now running the damn country and collectively seem to believe that you only have to believe harder and then Tinkerbell’s wand will be theirs to command.

Like Dorothy, just click your heels to go back to the past you want. The little engine that could can get up the hill and home by trying harder. Puffa puffa up the hill. I think can, I think I can.

I know we sent adults to Washington but collectively they seem to believe in magic thoughts and which school girl cliques of dreams they are accepted into is more important than what they said on campaign.

We get to eat their “confinement loaf” spiced by the left hand or spice by the right hand. Frank Zappa left us too soon.

You might not know this. The 5 day average of 3 month Treasury bill rates (not yield) is now higher than it was 6 months ago. My model thinks it’s a warning sign, just a warning though. It’s been years since it flipped that direction. I think it’s a positive sign at this point in the recession. Damn models never have enough info to be any good.

Did you know that Spain,Germany and Denmark have spent fortunes on green incentives and stimulus yet the alternative energy of wind and solar has done nothing to lower CO2 or even make a noticeable dent in their fossil fuel consumption. Their new green subsided jobs? Fully loaded salary would make an evil Wall Street trader blush in shame for getting so much for so little. Green might not be where the money is but Government Green is really lucrative

Perhaps you noticed that the average US government employee makes more than the average private sector employee. Just working for the man to save man from being man.

I’m thinking there’s trend going on that doesn’t get reported. It seems like every day for the last few weeks the news is reporting that Taliban and Al-Quieda top names are getting captured or meet their predator drone. Mostly occurring in Pakistan and far from the front lines. Why is the host country acting now and turning a diplomatic blind eye on the border crossing missiles and special forces?

Perhaps there’s been a diplomatic success of the Obama administration that diplomats don’t really want to brag on yet? Perhaps they need to write their memoirs, find a publisher and get re-elected in 2012 before we hear about success. When it comes to cleaning out a den of vipers though, all hands are welcome.

I can’t make this stuff up. A group of climate scientists want to create an advocacy group and place an advertisement in the NY Times. According to the Washington Times. The Time story smells fishy to me or is completely off the rails. The UN IPCC is the advocacy group. You need another? (actually, yes you do). Ad In the NY Times? Is that because the NYT failed to cover the story for 3 months so their readership is less informed and/or more receptive to full page advertisements?

There’s a lot of waving little red flags in the Times story, starting with their FOIA request and no mention or what that request was really for, or when the time period in which this allegedly happened. It’s suspicious to me. However, if true, there is a real gem of a quote at the end of page 2.

“We are dealing with an opposition that is not going to yield to facts or appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths,” he wrote.

Facts are good. We like facts. We like testable predications from computer models. Those would be evidence the hypothesis might be correct. How are we doing with those predictions?

Appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths. The way this reads to me is that this scientist thinks that 99.99% of the world that isn’t a climate scientist of high regard should bow down to their ” assertions and data are obvious truths”.

That’s how I read it and I haven’t begun to get snarky. Does any one else smell the sulfur of elitism? Scientists must save the poor uninformed masses. Please Sir, save us! Please! We’ll do do whatever you say, Master. Should we go back to the stone age for atonement and salvation? Should we sacrifice virgins to you? Just tell us what to believe, Master of High Regard.

Then again, maybe the Wa Time quoted that out of context.

NOTE to Washington Times. If you have the results of a FOIA request, you could post the whole thing and let the uniformed blogosphere and citizen journalist sort through it for context. Oh, sorry, we have to pay professional journalists to do that for us.

To paraphrase an old blues tune:

Everywhere you go,
pretty gatekeepers are all around

[Update Mar 6 2001]
I knew it smelled wrong. Not really a FOIA. Most likely an publicly accessible mailing list archive. You just have to know where to look. Seems the Washington Times found it first. Here’s the pdf of the emails (with dates). Then again some of it is redacted so maybe it is a FOIA request

If you thought the smack talk of the first set of leaked emails showed a “progressive” political bias in climate science or tribalism, hold onto to your seat cushions. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

[Update #2]
I can’t decide whether to laugh or giggle as they evolve their strategy to fight the blogosphere (the MSM in the US has been their back pocket for a decade, so no worries there, mates). I’m leaning towards laughing out load. I may have to dust of that old post of mine about why the smartest people do the dumbest things. Individually brilliant “in their narrow field” yet incomplete in the world at large. They mistake the apple on the desk for the real world.

Aha, my little rant of elitism was taken out of context. See, it pays to read the whole thing. (they’re still being elitists mind you, but that quote was about appearing to be elitist wasn’t a good idea)

O NOES, I was right after all! It was just a backhand slap to his climate crew to get some elitist, save the world sized cajones. It just gets more weird as these activist scientists get more paranoid. Yeah, Sen Inohofe is over the top but thats the political theater game. Don’t enter that game. He knows the rules of that game and you don’t. Or maybe that’s the price to pay for practicing post-normal politically correct activist science. I’m still suspicious of the email circumstances and missing replies that might not be in that record, but the words available for the unwashed suggest I’m not the nutter to worry about.

I’m always on the look out for that problem. Another reason I don’t like to follow conspiracy theories but sometimes you have to.. You can lose your investment ass believing, hoping and waiting they’ll call. Just ask. I know all about conventional wisdom and academic studies claiming black swans can’t exist.

Let’s just say I had a come to Jesus moment over the last 10 years and I have a handful of black swan droppings, if you want them, at the right price. That’s the risk with investing and I’m 100% accountable. I can’t blame anybody else. No floor and no ceiling. My problem to deal with. I should have sold back in 2000/2001. That was my error – I believed for too long. A lot of folks got there late and believed even longer. Sorry, I share your pain.

I was most likely very wrong about those WMD’s in Saddam’s Iraq. Some bloggers warned me and so far they were correct. If the “Nation Building” (aka force Democracy down there cultural throats) turns out to work, then I’ll get the last laugh. I don’t expect that to happen. But it could.

Count your wins but count your losses too and see how they balance out. I voted for Obama “the centrist, the no new taxes, the lobbyists won’t control me”. I’m guessing I made another boo boo.

Somethings just keep going and going. I got a comment on the cooking blog (on the thread that won’t die). No big deal until I looked at the reverse IP: Charon.simplot.com, 151.113.x.x (it’s a /16) and I got remembery and nostalgic about how that happened. I brow beat Jeff into filling out the IP space application and when he finally did it and the bill arrived, I authorized payment (coded to the periodicals/publications account, if memory serves). Then we went looking for a IP peer we could afford to run a land line too. Then we had to buy a decent computer to be the gateway, router and firewall. That was a capital budget item and there were special levels of hell for IT managers with capital requests. First, I had to convince my boss this was good idea – connecting to god knows who or what that we can’t influence. I’m sure he promoted it as an R&D experiment and if it fails the hardware can be re-purposed – a budget tactic I later came to hate as every fricking hardware or software captial request since then came in with an R&D taint. That was back when “IT is a competitive weapon” was in the business journals. Oh, the seminars!

Then we had to name the damn box which took a lot more time and effort than you might think. Logan came up with ‘Charon’. Staff agreed that didn’t suck and so it was and still is. For historians, our first usenet/internet gateway was named ‘riscy’ which was my pun on the CISC/RISC wars of the time and the idea of connecting to the tubes. Ultrix DecStation 3100, if memory serves. Gopher was the big dog protocol then and VMS couldn’t do all the IP stuff back then. The 3100 had plenty of cycles left over for some to learn the Unix command line (and FSF). That’s another story about who did what when, but Charon was Logan’s name, it lives on.

IT as a competitive advantage? Jobs were lost, careers disgraced, money and time wasted on that dream. Then it came to pass. Suddenly those skunk works connections to the lab rats of the world gained the mass we call the web. I’d used up my “tolerated rouge” political capital by then. I still remember the new boss driving the SUV in Houston after a night of Compaq dinner and glad handing and I was explaining how my home network (Slackware Linux 2.0.35) could serve files to Windows and Apple boxes. Brian asked me a question about Appletalk support (sucked then) and I said I just had to download patches when I found a problem or I could fix them myself. It’s all free and open. I remember the silence in the car after I expounded. I fucked up my last chance to be relevant and employed. Standing up to the quiet IBM drone in the drivers seat. They didn’t want to assimilate me in their new world order of Microsoft and IBM. I hear Oracle has deep hooks into the company. Somehow they found the way into the mouth of all the serious predators. Wasn’t on my watch.

Charon was.

David Byrne, well known musician (avant guard and always exploring) wrote this TED presentation where he explores how music, and musicians have changed because of the acoustic environments available to them, not because of some late night burst of creative ‘aha’ that creates a new hit, or a new genre of music. He calls it context. I’d call it adaptation. Either way it’s a useful perspective to ponder on.

Of course I will proceed to do that. Artistic creativity has a complex context. Physical or technology barriers and constraints that shift. Social acceptance would be another constraint. There’s even biological and evolutionary constraints to creativity. When I say “social” some would say “religious”.

How would this insight apply to the crumbling Cult of Global Warming? The wave of recent events is destroying their context. They blame the well funded denial machine but thats just lashing out at the ever present bogey men at the edges of their internal context. There is an unlimited supply of invisible opponents in the hive mind of liberal academia. Remember that Pew poll of scientists? 5% conservative, 14% very liberal, 42% liberal (or is it 54%, like that mistake would change anything). It’s easy to see why they think their bogey man is some right wing conspiracy because that’s what they believe about everything they don’t like.

Dr. Curry has made several attempts to cross the divide between cults to restore science to it’s glorious roots of dispassionate search for the truth. Well written and well argued.

Except what if the context of science (creativity) was never the dispassionate “seeker of truth” but was only a seeker of truth as they contextually define it? That would be the realm of religion and politics.

You didn’t think I could tie those threads together, did you? Me either and I’d don’t like the knot at the end. Just as religious faithful believe in their deity, I want to believe in science. It’s my clut of choice. The Bible and Churches have changed a lot to fit new social contexts. That eternal truth has varied a lot to fit the political and social context of the times. It’s not the first or last time the dogma of science has been bent for contextual purposes.